Here’s a follow-up on the story we noted Friday about the famous photo of a smoking Marine: The Los Angeles Times reports he is Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller, a 20-year-old native of Jonancey, Ky. Times photographer Luis Sinco snapped the picture that has turned Miller into something of a sex symbol:
The Los Angeles Times and other publications have received scores of e-mails wanting to know about this mysterious figure. Many women, in particular, have inquired about how to contact him. “The photo captures his weariness, yet his eyes hold the spirit of the hunter and the hunted,” wrote one e-mailing admirer. “His gaze is warm but deadly. I want to send a letter.”
Blake complains that he’s running low on cigarettes: “Tell Marlboro I’m down to four packs, and I’m here in Fallujah till who knows when. Maybe they can send some. And they can bring down the price a bit.” Miller smokes three packs a day, and the company medic, Anthony Lopez, tells the paper: “I tried to get him to stop–the cigarettes will kill him before the war. I get on him all the time. But this guy is a true Marlboro man.”
Lopez is right, of course, but that doesn’t make Linda Ortman any less ridiculous. Ortman’s scolding letter appeared in the Dallas Morning News Thursday (third letter):
Are there no photos of nonsmoking soldiers in Iraq?
We are all aware of how important it is to help people stop smoking because of health risks.
Please, Dallas Morning News, be more sensitive. Youth are easily influenced. Let’s stop reinforcing the smoking habit. Stop publishing photos like the one on the front page Wednesday.
The next day, a wonderful reply came from Steven Mitchell (third letter):
As an ex-smoker and ex-Marine, I have to agree with Ms. Ortman about how easily our youth are influenced. As soon as I made it home Wednesday afternoon, my 10-year-old asked me to take him to buy a pack of Camels and find the nearest recruiter’s office. And, please, can’t we get them to wash their faces first?
In truth, I’m amazed that you printed that nonsense.
The fuss over smoking warriors is nothing new. In 1917 G.K. Chesterton published an essay called “The Dregs of Puritanism” about a minister in Bromley, England, who was objecting to people sending cigarettes to British soldiers fighting World War I:
There is the lack of imaginative proportion, which rises into a sort of towering blasphemy. An enormous number of live young men are being hurt by shells, hurt by bullets, hurt by fever and hunger and horror of hope deferred; hurt by lance blades and sword blades and bayonet blades breaking into the bloody house of life. But Mr. Price (I think that’s his name) is still anxious that they should not be hurt by cigarettes. That is the sort of maniacal isolation that can be found in the deserts of Bromley.
These days, of course, fanaticism over hygiene is a largely secular phenomenon. Indeed, one wonders if some of those who’re offended by Cpl. Miller’s vice won’t soon be complaining that this photo violates the separation of church and state.
